"Why Is Anica Fundamentally Right?" and why I went as far as Tel Aviv to bring a Bessarabian rug back home?

in 2012, The National Ethographic Museum in Chisinau displayed several rugs that were saved from estrangement. I admired them but I could not stop wondering: if these are saved, where are those un-saved yet? A bit of history, a bit of logic and I found some. I brought one home.

@La Blouse Roumaine opened our eyes and opened the door for more. Now it's the right time.

Let's talk about Romanian rugs:

"<< Father took a bag full of huge, beautiful bench rugs and went out into the wide world to exchange it for food. My sister Anica (the rugs were her dowry) screamed and tried to pull it back. She was afraid she would not be able to get married without a rug. 'Shut up, you fool, otherwise you'll starve', father railed at her >>

The Bessarabian rug is a silent witness to an unimaginable tragedy, the famine that was provoked and controlled politically by the Soviet regime in 1945 – 1947. Now that we know how Bessarabian families tried to save themselves from starving by selling their daughters' dowries for a few loaves of bread or even for beet dregs, now that we know how entire villages were emptied by people because of starvation and deportations with just lonely wall rugs left behind, which the people of the republic carefully collected later on, and now that we know how the hands who had used to weave rugs ended up chopping wood in Siberia while weaving was turned into a textile industry manufacturing products in the factory or in the zavod while the weavers were turned into proletarians, now we can no longer see the Bessarabian rugs just as a minor decorative art or as a "folklore" expression of local specificity. Reminding us of sacrificed innocents, the Bessarabian rug is the somber but sonorous tombstone on the grave of the peasant civilization is Bessarabia ...

... Faced with her father's scolding, Anica seems to be a fool who does not understand what is at stake: a choice between life and death ! How can anyone choose between a rug and death?

But Anica does not have the ethnographer's outlook to understand that, in this new world, it is no longer necessary to have a rug to get married; Anica does not anticipate the universe of synthetic, cheap, available fabrics her daughters and granddaughters will live in, Anica cannot envisage the fact that one day the people who will live in her house will find the rug she did not want to part with and they will get rid of it either by throwing it away, or, in the best-case scenario, by selling it for next to nothing to an ethnographer-collector or to a merchant of folklore artifacts.

By her own choice, Anica refused to survive the death of her rug.

How can we undersdtand Anica's choice? By discovering what the rugs of the dowry have to say"

Petre Guran, introduction – Album: Bessarabian Carpets, by Varvara Buzila